Use of high-bandwidth transmission lines to implement local area networks (LANs) is becoming increasingly common. An example thereof is the Gigabit Ethernet LAN. The high-frequency transmission affected by such transmission lines make suppression of their radiated emissions a significant challenge, on account of the fact that radiated emissions, and the crosstalk to other signal lines caused thereby, increase as transmission frequency increases.
A notch filter is designed to reject a band of frequencies while passing through all other frequencies. Although the use of notch filters to filter out EMI is known (see, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,539,253), a technical challenge in developing a notch filter for EMI suppression is how to effectively deal with parasitic inductance and capacitance, which can deleteriously affect the intended performance of the filter. At ultra-high transmission frequencies, even small parasitic effects can cause significant problems and therefore must be accounted for in the notch filter design.